Leonardo da Vinci, a two-part film by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon, introduces the life and accomplishments of the fifteenth century Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). What works best in this production is the way in which Leonardo’s notebooks are skillfully edited into the narrative, accentuating that they are perhaps the crown jewel of his achievements. Viewing the numerous selections from the many thousands of pages he notated captures the vastness of his interests and helps to delineate the way that topics tended to recur throughout his life. For example, he repeatedly illustrated both the dynamics of water and the nature of the human body during many phases of his life. We also see how Leonardo was a hands-on thinker. Indeed, one particularly fascinating aspect of his notebooks is how they seamlessly mingled his innovative, cross-disciplinary ideas about art, invention, the body, and physical phenomena with grocery lists and the mundane.

Part I, “The Disciple of Experience,” introduces the younger Leonardo. Born out of wedlock to a notary and a peasant woman, he received limited formal education. He eventually came to see his lack of classical education as one of his greatest strengths, because it led him to spend his life trying to learn what he didn’t know. Leonardo is described as a generous man, with a sense of humor; a man who painted beautifully, and yet also loved the grotesque. This part acquaints us with his work in Verrocchio’s workshop; his earliest experiments with landscape, perspective, and paint; and the opening of his studio in Florence in the 1470s where he began to draw and devise an array of machines between commissions. Part I also covers his eighteen years in Milan under the patronage of Ludovico Sforza, the ruler of the Duchy of Milan. It was here that Leonardo produced some of his most famous works such as The Last Supper mural for the dining hall of a monastery.

One informative segment in Part I points out that, although Leonardo wrote nothing about homosexuality in his notebooks, it is also a topic that frequently comes up in Leonardo biographies. The practice was tolerated in his time, and the film mentions an early allegation when Leonardo was a young man. In this sequence we are also introduced to Salaì, who entered Leonardo’s household at the age of ten as a student. While it is unknown if they were lovers, they did become lifelong companions. The youth also served as a model for several works and his beautiful male or androgynous face was a Leonardo trademark. We also meet Francesco Melzi. He joined Leonardo’s studio in Milan. Fourteen at the time, Melzi remained Leonardo’s assistant throughout his career.  More of an intellectual companion than Salaì, his efforts insured the survival of Leonardo’s manuscripts.

Part II, “Painter-God,” begins in 1500, when Leonardo fled Milan for Venice. After a period of wandering, he was hired by Cesare Borgia, the military strongman who led the Papal troops. At this time, Borgia was in search of an engineer and cartographer. While working for him, Leonardo drew the first direct aerial view map, a topography conceptualized through his walks around the town’s terrain. He also met Niccolò Machiavelli while with Borgia. Now remembered for his ideas about political power, Machiavelli’s theories were framed through his observations of Borgia’s approach in this period. After Leonardo returned to Florence in 1503, he was hired (at Machiavelli’s behest) to draw military maps and advise on major engineering projects involving the Arno River. Machiavelli hoped to divert the river so as to deny Pisa access to the sea. Although this project was actually attempted at great cost, it was nevertheless unsuccessful. It was at this time that Leonardo began compiling his observations of water dynamics, geology, astronomy.

Part II then goes on to cover his time with the Melzi family villa after a period as the leading artist in Florence, his return to Rome after Giovanni de Medici became Pope Leo X, and, at sixty-four, his move to France at the invitation of Francis I. Along with his entourage, he carried several paintings over the Alps to the court at Amboise that eventually ended up in the Louvre. Leonardo spent his last three years there, dying in 1519. According to the film, Leonardo was somewhat downcast at the end of his life. He realized that his goals were unattainable, and many of his later drawings expressed his distress. Moreover, painting became difficult, probably the result of a small stroke, although he continued to draw and teach.

Like the notebooks, specialist voices offer a foundational thread throughout the production. They also humanize him, examine his extraordinary attributes, and place him vividly in his own time and ours. One example of this framing is the “The Painter-God” title used for Part II. It was derived from a comment made by art historian Francesca Borgo when she describes the Mona Lisa as a work that shows Leonardo’s ability to depict a beating heart, a thinking mind, a person who has emotions and, as her smile seems to suggest, an inner life. Borgo goes on to say that a painter who can do this is a painter-god because he can breathe life into an inanimate being. Overall, their commentaries convey that the accolades Leonardo receives today are well-deserved and that we continue to learn more about his pursuits as people continue to investigate his oeuvre. Insightful speakers include filmmaker Guillermo del Toro; critic Adam Gopnik; artist Kerry James Marshall; and Mary Zimmerman, a theater director. Writers and Leonardo biographers who add nuance are Carlo Vecce, Charles Nicholl, Ross King, Walter Isaacson, and Serge Bramly. Their thoughts are further buttressed by the art historians and historians who place him and his work contemporaneously. In this category, observations are offered by Claire Farago, Vincent Delieuvin, Msgr. Timothy Verdon, Francesca Borgo, Ingrid Rossellini, Martin Kemp, and Carmen Bambach. Astute explanations from Paolo Galluzzi, an historian of science; Morteza Gharib, an engineer; and Francis Wells, a surgeon, speak further to Leonardo’s innovative scope.

For example, one fascinating case discussed involved an old man Leonardo met at the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence. Over 100 years old, this old man told Leonardo that aside from some weakness, he felt that nothing was physically wrong with him. Then, he died in his sleep that night. Leonardo dissected his body a few hours later. In this period there were no means to preserve bodies, which made dissection and analysis more complicated than is the case today. At this point, more than two decades had passed since Leonardo’s revolutionary studies of the skull and his Vitruvian Man illustration, and it serves as one of the many incidents recording a return to an earlier area of interest.

As the surgeon Francis Wells explains in the film, what was extraordinary about Leonardo’s approach to studying the body is that despite the limitations of his era, Leonardo didn’t stop at the surface. Rather, he designed revolutionary experiments that allowed him to test and perceive internal organs and functions. In terms of the heart, for example, in 1513 he sought to demonstrate how the heart works. Using a wax model, made with synthetic valves, he asked himself how the mitral valve closes. This led him to make the first artificial heart. Producing a glass bulb in the shape of an aorta, he pumped water through it.  Next, he fed in grass seeds in the water so he could map the water’s flow and mimic the flow of the blood.  According to Wells, this work has influenced our thinking today and, in his view, Leonardo developed the world’s first artificial heart valve despite having no one to talk to about his experiments for there was no heart surgery or meaningful medicine at that time! Leonardo’s ideas, therefore, would not have made any sense even to the highly educated of the period. Similarly, with his animal dissections, the documents show us that he configured ways to look at the respiratory system, blood supply, muscles, bone structure, and so forth. While barely touched upon in the film, his insightful work with the brain using wax molds is equally noteworthy.

Another of Leonardo’s interests covered in the film is his fascination with birds and flying. He saw birds as machines that could fly and sought to understand this capability at different points throughout his life. One commentator tells us that Leonardo understood the concept of flying without being able to explain it. It took centuries for anyone to succeed in producing flying machines. In Leonardo’s case, this line of thought intersected with notations in his notebooks pertaining to studying the flight of birds, flying machine designs, aerodynamics, gravity, and the movement of air. All this work offers a robust counterpoint to his capacity to suggest movement and feeling with just a few brushstrokes. Among the devices he probed were clocks, perpetual motion machines, springs, gears, and military equipment, with the sum total suggesting he had a deep understanding of the principles of physics and mathematics.  His interest in animals is also evident throughout his life, particularly horses.

One of the final sequences in the film looks at Leonardo’s legacy. He died as a legend, and the legend deepened as he has become a part of history. That fact that this film is just the latest of the many that have added to history is in itself thought-provoking because Leonardo’s theatrical productions came up several times in the movie, implying that films are in tune with his love of dynamic presentations. In terms of his many other projects, his writings on art began circulating among artists in the mid 1500s. Eventually, the complete set of manuscript pages compiled by Melzi was found in the Vatican Library and published in 1817. In 1804 Mona Lisa came to the Louvre. By the twentieth century, it was clear that Leonardo’s multi-faceted person was hard to classify. Works like his Mona Lisa were so well known that they became a part of popular culture. In 1919 Marcel Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. depicted the Mona Lisa with a mustache and goatee on her face. Later Bob Dylan wrote of the painting in his 1966 song “Visions of Johanna”: “But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues / You can tell by the way she smiles.” Another song, quite line with Leonardo’s theatrical interests was written by Ray Evans and Jay Livingston for Paramount’s film Captain Carey (1950). This Mona Lisa which won the Academy Award for Best Original Song for 1950, includes the refrain “Are you warm, are you real, Mona Lisa?

Another strength is that this is a film that will work in classroom settings. Viewers will no doubt have a better appreciation of Leonardo upon finishing the film, and more than one viewing is recommended. It captures the polymath’s ability to think simultaneously and relationally about a variety of things throughout his life. The use of his notebooks throughout the film might encourage students to record their studies and to annotate their thinking as well after seeing how writing and drawings helped Leonardo’s mind work as he created solutions to problems and pushed boundaries. This is especially clear through his extensive anatomical drawings. We perceive that he was interested in how the body appears and because he believed a deep knowledge of human anatomy was essential to depicting the human form as an artist, he drew it extensively. Yet, as time passes, he also wanted to know how the body functions, physiology and emotionally. Thus, all aspects of humanity became a part of his notebooks, and his repertoire.

A further strong point is that all his best-known paintings are explored in detail and in several cases his experimental techniques are included in the discussion. This was the case with The Last Supper (1494-1498) and of his preparatory studies for the incomplete mural of The Battle of Anghiari in the Salone dei Cinquecento in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence (1504-1505). The Last Supper started to deteriorate even during Leonardo’s lifetime and a Giorgio Vasari work eventually replaced the never-completed Battle of Anghiari painting. It is noteworthy that the film’s educational value will increase after its release later this year. There are plans to add educational materials to the Ken Burns in the Classroom website [1]. I hope these supplements will include identification of some of the paintings and manuscripts by people other than Leonardo that are used to contextualize the narrative. While a book would include captions and a bibliography, the more attenuated style of a film presentation does not aid one who wants to investigate in further depth.

In conclusion, given this film’s range and humanizing touch, it will no doubt appeal to both general and specialist audiences — and especially to those who comprise the Leonardo community. A comprehensive script conveys Leonardo’s expansive legacy, his inquiring mind, and exceptional skills as a painter, cartographer, innovator, and technologist. Using commentators to speak about details aids in clearly conveying Leonardo’s range. Ken Burns and his collaborators have been creating profound historical documentary films for more than forty years and this one is another successful production in the series. Also noteworthy is the original music composed by Caroline Shaw and performed by Attacca Quartet, Sō Percussion and Roomful of Teeth. Scheduled for to air on PBS Channel in the United States on November 18 and 19. Educationally, Leonardo da Vinci will benefit from more than one viewing. For example, the first seven minutes set the stage through summarizing the vastness of Leonardo’s accomplishments seemed somewhat jumbled the first time I watched it. On re-visiting the summary after watching the complete film, I found the opening informative and was interested to realize how much watching the complete film had changed my response to its introduction.

References

[1] Ken Burns in the classroom, https://ca.pbslearningmedia.org/collection/kenburnsclassroom/home/.